Show HN: Onlook – Open-source, visual-first Cursor for designers

📰 Hacker News · hoakiet98

Hey HN, I’m Kiet – one half of the two-person team building Onlook ( https://beta.onlook.com/ ), an open-source [ https://github.com/onlook-dev/onlook/ ] visual editor that lets you edit and create React apps live on an infinite canvas. We launched Onlook [1][2] as a local-first Electron app almost a year ago. Since then, “prompt-to-build” tools have blown up, but none let you design and iterate visually. We fixed that by taking a visual-first, AI-powered approach where you can prompt, style, and directly manipulate elements in your app like in a design tool. Two months ago, we decided to move away from Electron and rewrite everything for the browser. We wanted to remove the friction of downloading hundreds of MBs and setting up a development environment just to use the app. I wrote more here [3] about how we did it, but here are some learnings from the whole migration: 1. While most of the React UI code can be reused, mapping from Electron’s SPA

Published 29 May 2025
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